Great info Nathaniell, thank you. I'd better be careful in the future!
Ray

Great information like always, thank you sir.

Thanks for the reminder because I am planning to have one.

Thanks for giving me something to link to. I purchased blogwithwordpress.com before I realized that I couldn't use wordpress as part of the name. But this story has a happy ending, I now have blogwithwp.com which is shorter, and shorter is usually better.

Thank you for the info

Nathaniell, Thanks for the heads up. You always seem to have great info.
Barbara

Thank you for saving me the head ache in the long run... much, much appreciate it ;)...!

Great info from a credible source... good job.

You might think that it is the registrar's requirement to ensure your domain isn't infringing, but you'd actually be wrong (generally, some TLDs use what is called the Trademark Clearing House or TMCA) to provide a quick check if the domain might tread on an existing copyright, but that isn't actually feasible for the registrar to do as there are literally millions of trademarks in hundreds of countries. For that matter, sometimes, the same trademarked work might be valid for more than one trademark, such as the US company Apple Inc and UK's Apple Corps. One is a computer company we're likely all familiar with, while the other is a multimedia corporation owned by the Beatles which in turn contains Apple Records. By trademark alone, which of those companies has the rights to Apple.com then?
Trademark based registrations is a very interesting topic in general though, and is one of the major points for which the UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) was created to handle. Currently, we live in a very interesting time where the UDRP itself is in the process of undergoing a chance to favor the trademark even more heavily though, and so I would advocate staying away from trademarked domains and their misspellings as a registration idea. Sometimes you can be protected under the creative commons, but the UDRP panel actually isn't bound by the Creative Commons legal code (as that is only binding to the US and ICANN, the regulatory board of the internet is by definition multi-national) so that defense may not help you much when push comes to shove. That said, as noted in the initial post, feel free to go hog wild on review posts and anything to the right side of your dot as those are much less costly to fix if called into question, and are generally far harder to pursue anyway outside of DMCA, which only applies if you're hosting actual digital content about the trademark, such as a movie or protected pictures.

I really liked reading your blog. I never thought of this as an issue until now. I, like you, would assume that if I could purchase the domain then there shouldn't be any kind of problem with it. At least you weren't making any kind of significant income on the websites that you took down. That would have been so frustrating. I mean, what a headache it would have been. Sorry you had trouble with Facebook over it but I think it's great that you took that experience and shared it here for others. You are helping to prevent a lot of people from getting into potentially sticky situations. Thanks for sharing : )